On my recent long airplane ride I read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. I had avoided this book because most biologists speculating on pre-history are incompetent.
The book was enjoyable and I read it with pleasure. A few days later I realized the guy is totally dishonest and should have recalled the book and apologized long ago.
Diamond’s concern is that the Americas, Australia and Polynesia were conquered by Europeans with few men and little resistance. He is particularly shocked by Cortez’s few hundred men who defeated the Aztec’s millions of men. A one hour battle. Diamond has an elaborate thesis about the variety of domesticated plants and animals on different continents and the thousand year repercussions of these plants and animals on disease and social organization.
When I got home, and thought about Diamond's book. I came up with two counter examples that totally discredit this guy's thinking.
The British, with a few thousand men, conquered India with tens of millions of people and no disease to help the Brits win. Jared considers the Brits and India to be on the same continent with the same plants and animals.
The Japanese conquered Korea, Mongolia and China, easily, against gigantic numeric odds, when all four countries had the same two thousand year history of domesticated plants and animals.
An honest person would have confronted these glaring counter examples and pulled their idiot book off the market.